1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to name dialers and more specifically to disambiguating homophone results in a name dialer.
2. Introduction
Many governmental, business, and nonprofit organizations use automated speech recognition (ASR) in phone directories of employee names to replace the traditional large-business switchboard. Instead of asking an operator to connect the call, such phone directories prompt a caller to say the name of the person they are trying to contact. An ASR system converts the speech to text. The phone directory locates the n-best matches to the uttered name. If only one match is found, the phone directory either connects the caller immediately or requests an explicit or implicit confirmation that the found match is the same person the caller wanted to contact. If more than one match is found, conventional systems check if the names are spelled exactly the same because that is a computationally simple check. If the matching names are spelled the same, then a phone directory provides some sort of disambiguation prompt, such as “Do you mean Eric Clark in Florida or Eric Clark in Montana?”
However, this approach can lead to some confusing situations where two names are spelled differently but sound the same. For example, Eric Clark and Erik Clarke are spelled differently, but pronounced the same. A check for matching spelling would not catch these two names. A traditional name dialing system would prompt a user “Do you want Eric Clark or Erik Clarke?” Because communications are spoken, not in writing, and because the names sound exactly the same, the caller is likely to become confused and frustrated, not knowing which of the presented names is correct. Further, the name dialing system appears to be broken or unintelligent because the names are the same from the caller's point of view.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved way of providing disambiguation in name dialers.